Source: Asia Society (nd)
Saturday Fiction and Conversation with Director Lou Ye
Michael Berry
One of China’s most thought-provoking, artistically daring directors, Lou Ye, returns to the big screen with his latest film, Saturday Fiction, opening this weekend in Los Angeles and New York. Check out the film, starring Gong Li, before tuning in to an exclusive conversation between director Lou and UCLA Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies Michael Berry.
Saturday Fiction is set in 1941, where since the Japanese occupation, China has become a wartime intelligence battlefield for the Allies and the Axis Powers. Iconic actress Jean Yu returns to Shanghai, ostensibly to appear in the play “Saturday Fiction” directed by her former lover. But what is her true aim? To free her ex-husband? To gather intelligence for the Allied Forces? To work for her adoptive father? Or to escape from war with her lover? As she embarks on her mission, with friends ever more difficult to distinguish from undercover agents, as everything spirals out of control, Jean Yu starts to question whether to reveal what she has learned about the imminent Pearl Harbor attack.
Details on the conversation, which will debut next week on Asia Society’s YouTube channel, will be forthcoming.
Speakers:
Lou Ye was born to a theatrical family in Shanghai in 1965. He spent his childhood in theaters and studied at Shanghai School of Fine Arts before working as an animator at Shanghai Animation Studio. He graduated from Beijing Film Academy in 1989, majoring in directing. His films have been selected by all the major international festivals (Cannes, Venice, the Berlinale, Rotterdam, Taipei Golden Horse Awards, Chinese Independent Film Festival, Asian Film Awards,) and awarded various prizes, including the Silver Bear at the Berlinale for Blind Massage and the Best Screenplay Prize at Cannes Film Festival for Spring Fever.
Michael Berry is a translator and author who is a professor of contemporary Chinese cultural studies and Director of the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA. He has written and edited eight books on Chinese literature and cinema, including Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (2006), A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (2008), and most recently An Accented Cinema: Jia Zhang-Ke on Jia Zhang-Ke (2021). He has served as a film consultant and a juror for numerous film festivals, including the Golden Horse (Taiwan) and the Fresh Wave (Hong Kong). A two-time National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, Berry’s book-length translations include The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai (2008) by Wang Anyi, shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize; To Live (2004) by Yu Hua, a selection in the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read library; and Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City (2020) by Fang Fang.